Brian Castner, Disappointment River ** 1/2

Well, I suppose the word is right there at the front of the title.

I am a connoisseur of books where an author retraces the travels of an historical explorer through a compelling landscape, such as Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau. This approach is a means for the author to color their descriptions of an exotic place with insights from their historical significance, and to show the present is shaped by the past. In Disappointment River, the place is the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories of Canada, the explorer is Alexander Mackenzie, and the historical context is the 18th-century fur trade and the quest for a Northwest Passage to Asian markets.

Disappointment River was well written but let me down in several ways.

First of all, there's no map. The story describes voyages through the pays d'en haut (Upper Country), but any time I wanted to get a sense of where they were –– which was often –– I had to pull out my atlas, which didn't always use the eighteenth century place names.

Second, Mackenzie's voyage and Castner's don't illuminate or enrich each other. Both explorers are so wrapped up in their daily struggles with weather and mosquitoes and logistics that they fail to capture their surroundings. For example, at one point Castner and his partner appear to be struggling in the wilderness along a tricky section of the river, when suddenly a barge nearly swamps them. So there is commercial traffic this far up the river? Chapters alternate between the trips, but they feel completely unrelated; even the country sounds different.

Third, the balance between adventure and historical context is off kilter. The first half of the book outlines Mackenzie's childhood and describes the business of the fir trade. Mackenzie and his modern counterpart don't arrive at the mouth of the river until page 138, almost exactly half way through the book.

Lastly, I think it's misleading to suggest that the Mackenzie River represents a Northwest Passage. First of all, it provides a passage only for the far northern section of the fur trapping area: the trip to the headwaters at Great Slave Lake remains arduous. Also, in Mackenzie's time the outlet in the Arctic Ocean was icebound.